Around the World, Press Freedom is “Under Attack”
International organizations and the media were alarmed by the threats ahead of the 30th anniversary of Press Freedom Day on Tuesday.
Video intervention by Antonio Guterres in New York on May 2, 2023.
AFP
In this case, UNESCO presented the World Press Freedom Award for the year 2023 to three imprisoned Iranian journalists on Tuesday evening. Elahe Mohammadi and Nilufer Hamedi, who helped publicize Mahza Amini’s death in custody in September, and human rights activist Narkes Mohammadi.
“I come from Iran, where being a journalist is a crime,” US-based journalist and women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad told a conference organized by UNESCO at UN headquarters in New York. 30th Anniversary of International Press Freedom Day. “As a journalist, a citizen journalist, I can send you to prison, have you killed, tortured”.
“Freedom of the press is the lifeblood of human rights. But press freedom is under attack all over the world,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a video message. “Journalists and media workers are being directly targeted online while doing their core work. They are harassed, intimidated, arrested and jailed every day,” he lamented.
“The Struggle for Freedom for All”
While he did not name names or countries, other speakers highlighted individual circumstances, such as the detention of an American journalist from the “Wall Street Journal” named Ivan Kershkovich in Russia on espionage charges.
“The struggle for freedom of the press, the struggle for Ivan’s freedom, the struggle for the freedom of all,” asserted Almar Latur, director of the “WSJ” publication. Despite the dangers, “we cannot stop reporting what is happening in the world,” he pleaded. “There is no better response to autocracies that try to suppress and trivialize journalism than to give the world better journalism.”
Beyond harassment and arrests, according to Reporters Without Borders, 55 journalists and 4 media collaborators were killed in the line of duty worldwide in 2022. The “unacceptable” situation, UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay stressed, insisting that many of these journalists are killed “in their homes, often in front of their families.”
An “Avalanche” of Misinformation
For 30 years, if progress has been made to freedom of the press, especially in terms of laws guaranteeing access to information, he assessed, “we also need a lot of clarity, nothing has been obtained, on the contrary.” Beyond the attacks on journalists, he warned that “the advance of the digital age is changing the entire information landscape,” stressing that in this context, “we need (journalists) more than ever.”
Because “truth is threatened by disinformation and hate speech, which seeks to blur the lines between fact and fiction, between science and conspiracy,” Antonio Guterres added. The UN Secretary-General also expressed concern over the “increasing concentration of the media industry in the hands of a few and the bankruptcy of many independent media”.
“Technology, which has given journalists the ability to reach people anywhere, has undermined the business model of news,” said New York Times managing editor AG Sulzberger, “and an Internet avalanche of misinformation, propaganda, commentary, and solicitation of content has flooded the information ecosystem and overwhelmed our trusted journalism.” “When a free press weakens, democratic erosion always follows. And unsurprisingly, this period of press weakness coincides with the destabilization of democracies and the emboldening of autocracies,” he said.
“Unfortunately, censorship has become the default position of many governments to control what society knows and bend it to their will,” commented Agnes Callamard, Secretary-General of Amnesty International. “But everything bent is our future.”
AFP
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